In an effort to fashion some kind of Republican party machinery in Virginia in the early nineteenth century, a State Central Committee of Correspondence brought together several locally powerful elite groups of Republicans in the interest of party unity and continuity. The organization became known as the Richmond or Essex “Junto.” After the War of 1812, Spencer Roane, chief justice of Virginia’s Supreme Court of Appeals, mounted a successful campaign to restore strict construction as the touchstone of republican purity. The essence of Junto ideology lay in the states’ rights philosophy expressed in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. Roane sought to revive Virginia’s reputation among the states and reestablish its moral leadership of the new nation. Though a clique of no more than twenty men, many related to each other, the Junto was the only organization in early Virginia politics, giving it an authority beyond its numbers.
Further Reading
Daniel P. Jordan, Political Leadership in Jefferson’s Virginia.
This Vignette Provided By
William Shade, Old Dominion, New Commonwealth: The History of Virginia, 1607-2007
